The queer traditions of King’s College, Cambridge

Interviewed on television for his 80th birthday in 1959, E.M. Forster said that one of the reasons he was so fond of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had lived as a Fellow since 1946, was ‘a very precious tradition, that the old people and the young can meet here very easily and without self-consciousness’. In this svelte and sprightly book, Simon Goldhill (himself a Fellow of King’s) traces this tradition over some 140 years, and describes the part it played in the creation of a remarkable, ever evolving community of gay men.

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He begins his story in 1885 when J.K. Stephen, the future tutor to Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor, became a Fellow of the college. As Goldhill notes, this was also the year in which the Labouchère amendment made all sexual acts between men illegal, and thus criminalised not only Stephen but most of the book’s other leading characters. Like many Kingsmen, Stephen had been educated at Eton, where his tutor was Oscar Browning, who had himself been a pupil there, gone on to King’s, and then went back to the school to become a popular teacher. Browning’s closeness to certain boys had led to his being sacked; but this proved no bar to his returning to King’s as a Fellow, where intimate friendships between teachers and students were not merely accepted but encouraged. ‘The young men who came from school to university, to be met and educated by older dons, became those older dons in turn, or returned to college as friends from outside,’ Goldhill writes.

This resulted in a community created by ‘intergenerational passing on – of stories, possessions, values’ that evolved ‘at the same time that homosexuality as a developed idea was coming into being’.